1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to ontology management systems and more specifically to an ontology system providing enhanced search capability.
2. Related Art
Information refers to knowledge presented in the form of data, text, images, sounds, codes, and computer programs individually or in combination. One challenge in the management of information is the organization of the information to enable inference of conclusions (or in general reason about the information) based on the knowledge represented in the organized form. Different approaches can be used for organizing information and for inferring conclusions.
In one approach, information is organized in the form of a database, wherein the information is provided in the form of tables, columns, constraints (specifying primary/foreign keys, restriction on each type of data, etc.), etc. The manner in which the information is modeled in the database is referred to as a schema. Thus, a schema provides a conceptual and/or physical view of the information in the database, enabling inference of conclusions from the information.
In another approach, information is organized in the form of an ontology system. An ontology system organizes information in the form of objects, concepts (or classes) and relations existing among the objects/concepts (portions of which are referred to as a ontology). In general, an ontology may be viewed as a graph containing nodes (representing concepts/objects, etc.) and edges representing links/relations between the nodes. For further details of ontology systems, the reader is referred to the book entitled “Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web” by Asuncion Gomez-Perez et al with ISBN number 1-8523-3551-3.
An ontology system generally provides such conceptualization of information while hiding the details of implementation (which can be based on flat files such as XML or based on data stored in databases). As such, for inference of conclusions (or reasoning) about information, an ontology system is often considered to be more desirable compared to a database.
It is often required that a user be provided a facility to search for information of interest in ontology systems. In one prior approach, the search was conducted based on keywords (or text) provided by a user. Such a search capability may not be adequate in several scenarios.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.